In the field of computing, a benchmark is the act of running a computer program, a set of programs, or other operations, in order to assess the relative performance of an object, as against other similar objects. For example, benchmarking has commonly been associated with assessing performance characteristics of computer hardware, for example, the floating point operation performance of a central processing unit (CPU). In the field of cloud computing, businesses and enterprises are interested in how the performance of their websites and web-based applications compares against others. Of particular interest is how their website or web application performs in terms of user engagement.
User engagement may be correlated to web performance by comparing landing page or home page load time performance against a performance metric known as the “bounce rate”, which represents a ratio or percentage of visits to a website that only involve one web page (e.g., landing page), versus users who click on an actionable item or icon (e.g., to place an item in a shopping cart) or who actually view multiple web pages. For example, if in a given time period there are 100 visits to the website and 10 of those visitors immediately left without visiting another page, the bounce rate would be 10%. Since there is a strong correlation between the speed of a website (e.g., the to load a webpage) and the probability of a user bouncing, analytics that gives businesses and developers insight into real user measurements (RUM) across all browsers and locations is very valuable.
Systems and methods for real-time capture of actual user experiences on a website, web application or mobile application are known in the art. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 9,021,362, which is herein incorporated by reference, teaches a system and method for visualized data analytics generated from the collection and consolidation of real-user measurements, as actual users are accessing a webpage or web application. In addition, various companies offer websites performance benchmarks by industry and geography. For instance, site 24×7.com provides website performance benchmarks that list the average response times and availability of the top twenty global websites covering various business segments.